00:04what about the subject in terms of topic Todd how do you decide this is this is an
00:09area I want to spend a lot of time on well it kind of chose me I think you know
00:14I grew up in
00:15Ohio and I think there's an Ohio connection here at the front table you have to be kidding me all
00:23right there we go but you can't grow up in Ohio and not hear the names Neil Armstrong John Glenn
00:33the Wright brothers that's where you know aviation was founded so North Carolina not North Carolina
00:38that's right the most presidents I believe but you know I think it was distilling the myth of all of
00:45that for me you know there's been so much made about Apollo 11 the mission had been covered you
00:51know ad nauseum in films and fiction and nonfiction so it was really a research project to kind of
00:56drill down into those myths and see you know that who these people really were and once you start
01:03researching what the astronauts and and who they were then you start figuring out that it's this
01:08massively big project that wasn't just about the astronauts there was hundreds of thousands of
01:13people that were involved in this almost half a billion people around the world that were involved
01:19to make this mission a success so it's really where it started and also 20,000 companies you
01:25know I can't I don't think we can get 20 companies to talk to each other nowadays but back then
01:30to have
01:31that kind of cooperation for the common goal was the pinnacle of human history
01:41you're obviously relying on archival footage in Apollo 11 and we've talked about gaining the trust of a
01:46subject how do you get the trust to handle that material we had made a short film about Apollo 17
01:53and that was very well received inside the halls at NASA and from technical experts and historians
02:00and it was really an attempt to just it was almost a purely technical you know it was a curiosity
02:07for me
02:07but then I started looking at the photographs they took and the film footage that they took and it's just
02:14immensely beautiful all of the Apollo air cinematographers are ASC members American
02:20Society of Cinematography members and then there's a reason for that they shot some of the most iconic
02:24you know shots in cinema history it really comes back to that trust and and once we started working with
02:32the
02:32material they saw that you know we had kind of going on in all in on it we invented a
02:38prototype scanner a film
02:39scanner still to this day the only one in existence to handle large format film that could scan it in
02:4616k
02:47but then there was also the story aspect we started working with NASA's chief historian Bill Barry the
02:53astronauts their families and and just inviting them into the process
03:03thinking about audience is there one person who you really would love to have see your film young
03:08people for me yeah it's the biggest I mean when we do screenings to see people that live through it
03:13have their experience but then they bring uh young you know whether they're their kids or a science
03:19group it's it's phenomenal we were in theaters on IMAX screens for a week in March and we got kicked
03:24off the
03:25screen for Captain Marvel and I said we had the real superheroes um and that's kind of the point
03:31with all of that you know I enjoy you know going to a cinema uh I realize it's a rare
03:35experience that
03:36a documentary could get in that space but the beauty of uh all of what's available now with all the
03:43multi-platforms is comes down to the story um and there is a need I think for uh you know
03:49these bigger
03:50even large screens there was one woman she was the first uh mission controller and uh mission control
03:56her name was Poppy Northcutt and we had a screening and she comes out and does Q&As with us
04:00and I had
04:01this uh Brazilian woman came up and she had read about uh Poppy uh she was 10 years old in
04:07Brazil uh and
04:08in 1974 she read an article about Poppy being the first uh female in mission control and it inspired her
04:15to go get her PhD uh in England uh she now works at JPL and she's in the Guinness Book
04:20of World Records
04:20for finding the most volcanoes on a moon orbiting Jupiter so uh and I saw them meet for the first
04:27time
04:27and they had tears in their eyes and they were crying about it
Comments